I learned from writer Bill Ruthhart (and Bruce Dold, who was quoted in the piece) in the Tribune on Christmas Day last year that [Mayor Rahm Emanuel]’s press office was told “if he writes something newsworthy…something that has a strong opinion, we’re interested in running it. If you want to submit [self-congratulatory] pieces that are… self-serving, we have no interest…”

But apparently if you bemoan any aspect of a woman’s right to control her own body, you get special-Trib-treatment. Case in point: Brittany Clingen Carl got preferential treatment, since her very long letter – far from an article – on her opinion of why Governor Bruce Rauner should veto a bill allowing women to get an “elective” abortion (not due to rape or incest or protecting the life of the mother, in Carl’s limited view – she apparently doesn’t support an abortion for the heartbreaking news comes that the fetus is malformed or already dead in the womb). Carl might edit the website “Reclaiming Feminism,” for conservative women, even though the book by Miriam Frank of the same title (and subtitled Challenging Everyday Misogyny, a phrase Carl surely has never uttered) goes unacknowledged, and write for Smart Girl Politics, another conservative-friendly site, but she is unclear on all the reasons a woman feels compelled to have an abortion, or she doesn’t care about anyone else’s travails.

Carl’s piece had a strong opinion, no doubt about it, but also and especially it was self-serving. Because she is not for abortion rights, the Governor should therefore also not be?

The Governor represents – as he should – the majority of Illinois citizens, most of whom are pro-choice. Vetoing this bill will not make abortion safe, legal or rare, as so many politicians claim to desire, it will return women and girls to back-alley moneygrubbing abortion mills, which are more immoral by far than a woman trying to manage the size of her family and control her own destiny.

Do conservative women like herself stand in line, clamoring to adopt babies “saved” from being aborted? I don’t think they help to raise the children of women who are too poor to afford legal, safe abortions. They want to tell others what to do, even when they themselves have nothing to do with those women’s lives, even when the woman wants to take the medications to terminate a pregnancy which her physician has prescribed for her.

Carl’s piece should have been cut — as the Tribune has often done with my longer pieces — and assigned to the letters to the editor space.

And Rauner, who won many moderate voters over by assuring us that not only would he protect taxpayers, he was pro-choice? He should stand by what he told us those scant few years ago, and not listen to these back-door attempts to tell live women what we “ought” to do about our families or lack thereof.

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About majaramirez

former assistant instructor in tai chi chu'an; current TreeKeeper (#467); former Master Gardener; member of American Bird Conservancy, Audubon, Fraternal Order of Police, and Mensa; career cop, now assigned as Warrant/Summons Officer at Branches 29 & 42; wife and mom.